There's a pretty trivial hack to disable TMoUS's ability to detect tethering, so unless they've changed how they do that the nominal limit on tethering is irrelevant. Basically, use a "custom" APN that just happens to be the normal phone-data APN. The default configuration uses a different APN for tethered data, which they use to track your usage. By setting the custom APN, all data is routed through there and treated as phone data.
The $30/mo for 1500min plan is still available, it's just been relegated to relatively small print near the bottom of the page. http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans still lists it (and the $30 for unlimited texts and data, 100min talk) though, as well as the new plans. You just have to scroll down a bit.
They actually still do, those plans just aren't marketed hard anymore. See the last two plans listed on this page, specifically the one on the left: http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans
Yeah, I don't know why they aren't marketing plans those better; to most people I think they're much better options. I'm sure there are people who still need unlimited minutes, but personally I almost never use even the 300 minutes that it would take to make that plan have the same cost as the baseline new plan ($30/mo w/ 100min + 200 addl. min/mo at $0.10/min = $50/mo for 300mi/mo) and I definitely use a hell of a lot more data than that (it helps that I'm on an effectively unlimited plan, but even counting tethering I almost never break 2GB; I'm currently at around 1GB).
Sounds more like you just have a really shitty phone... I've had visual voicemail (which is a 0.00 line item on my bill) for about two years with T-Mobile. Yes, what I had *before* the VVM was complete crap, and a phone update was required to use VVM... but it works fine now! It's getting about time for me to upgrade, too.
The desktop is *right there* where it always was (ok, you have to click 1 button to show it when the PC starts up now, whoop-de-fucking-do). Why are people even trying to use Metro on work machines? It's awful for productivity. Fortunately, Win8 has not taken away the desktop, and it offers quite a few improvements that have nothing to do with Metro at all - in fact, it offers some desktop-specific improvements too!
That's an awful lot of hackery and wasted effort for something the OS does for you...
Either set shortcut hotkeys (right-click the shortcut, select Properties, select Shortcut Key, press the keybinding chord you want to use - for example, Ctrl+Shift+F for Firefox) or just pin the apps you want and press Win+[#] (as in, Win+4 to launch the fourth pinned app, note that this must be done as a chord not a sequence like you do now), or just use Start search (which still works on Win8, mostly) and hit Win+[first few letters of prog name]+Enter.
I have a Win8 tablet and a desktop running it (as well as FreeBSD, OpenSuse Linux, Backtrack Linux, and a handful of others in VMs). On both of them, I spend nearly all my time in the desktop. What about the Win8 desktop feels non-"normal" to you? The fact that the Start button is hidden until you mouse over it? Boo hoo, I'm sorry but that is a ridiculous complaint. Aside from that difference, and the removal of transparent window borders (which is lame but hardly a huge blow to the OS), the desktop works just like it did on Win7, with the addition of the nifty Win+X menu (also reachable by right-clicking the Start button) and the pretty much irrelevant not corners. Well, and the vastly improved multi-desktop support, but I doubt that's what you were griping about.
Now, the Start screen itself... that could use some improvement. I don't give a damn about it being a screen instead of a menu; I haven't used a Start menu since XP and the fact that in XP you have virtually no choice on the matter is one of the things I detest about that OS. Start search is better than the menu in almost every possible way; it's faster, it lets you search by program title or executable name, you don't have to know the path to something, you don't ever have to scroll, you can find by partial match on a name, and it doesn't require any additional clicks to use.
Or, at least, it didn't. Win8's Start search still works, but "Apps" and "Settings" and "Files" are now segregated, showing only one at a time and requiring a couple clicks (or a mouse action, which is stupid for a text-driven tool like search) to switch between them. That is my biggest complaint about Win8. My second-biggest is the fact that you can no longer have Windows Media Center and the Subsystem for Unix Applications in the same OS edition... yeah, I use esoteric features.
Metro I find to be mostly useless, so I don't use it (except for the few hundred miliseconds it takes to type Win + [some letters of program name] + Enter).
Yep, that's a good example of 2FA. Calling "username and password" two factors is foolish; your username isn't even an authentication credential at all in most cases (that is, it's typically at least semi-public information). It's an identifier, not a credential.
However, even if the username is treated as a second password, then you don't really have two passwords; you have one long password with a break in the middle. There's no meaningful difference between them at that point.
I can't see someone supporting a game for more than a year or so unless they have a revenue stream from downloadable content.
This makes me sad. Very, very sad. It's a sorry state we've fallen to in just a few years.
Blizzard Entertainment released StarCraft in 1998, almost exactly 15 years ago, and its expansion Brood War later that year. Although they occasionally re-packaged the game for digital downloads or "Battle Chest" bundles, they never introduced any new paid content. However, for months (years) they released freely downloadable maps. They continued patching the game for almost 11 years, releasing the final patch in 2009. While early patches were largely balance tweaks and bug fixes, they also updated the game to work on new operating systems and released a legitimate no-CD patch and online installer. The download site for patches is still live, including for older patch versions. The online multiplayer servers (Battle.Net) are still up, and are still free to use (there is, or used to be, some generally unobtrusive advertising).
I used to love that company. I still play their old games, in fact the last copy of SC that I bought was less than five years ago. However... I can't stand what they're doing with always-online gaming in every game newer than WarCraft 3. WOW had an excuse, but SC2 and D3 don't. I regret this, because it means I won't buy those games even though I quite enjoyed the SC2 beta. But in the meantime, their older games still work just fine... and when I get a new PC, I can install the games, the bonus maps, and the patches without worrying about whether I'll need to grab them from some shady site or whether they'll work on my PC*
* SC was never recompiled for x86 Macs, although it was updated to run on OS X. If you have a new version of OS X that doesn't include support for Rosetta (the PPC emulator layer), you can run the game in Windows or Wine just fine; a purchased copy was good for both operating systems.
To be fair, Flash on the N800 *was* a battery hog that substantially impacted performance. On the other hand, the N800 could use FlashBlock and/or AdBlock Plus, so you could get all the benefits of Flash (I used to use it to stream from Pandora, for example) without the downsides (slow ad networks impacting browsing performance, annoying animations leaping out at you, pages slowing down while the CPU struggles with Flash, etc.)
At the time that I was messing with the N800 (Maemo OS2008 had just come out, I think), the fact that the iPhone could play YouTube vides was a big freaking deal... but the N800 could play not just YouTube, but any other Flash videos online and didn't need to switch apps to do it, either. It could also play (many) Flash games, navigate Flash-based websites, and so on. For a device that was also largely sold on the quality of its mobile browsing experience, the iPhone browser was lame compared to the OS2008 browser (Gecko-based - previous versions had been Opera-based - and extensible).
Of course, despite its screen being smaller and lower-resolution, the iPhone did have one notable advantage over the N800: capacitive touchscreen vs. resistive touchscreen. Resistive has some perks, like the ability to be really precise with a stylus (though the handwriting recognition was "meh" at best), but it had no multitouch capability and required the application of non-trivial pressure, which over time could damage the screen surface a bit.
Um... copyright does prohibit making (unlicensed) copies of software, just as it prohibits making unlicensed copies of books, paintings, musical recordings, and so on. That applies as much to a modern copy of Windows as to an archaic player piano paper roll. It also applies to textbooks. It is (legally) distinct from first sale.
The difference is that the person in question here actually paid for each copy that was purchased, then re-sold those copies. The right to do that is what was upheld. Duplicating a copyrighted work without a license to do so - such as using a hole-punch to duplicate the information encoded in strips of hole-punched paper - is still illegal, and has been since well over 100 years ago.
Just to be clear, I don't in any way disagree with the sentiment you were expressing (that software should be treated the same as other copyrighted works). I'm mostly objecting to your choice of example, implying that creating unlicensed copies of a purchased (but copyrighted) work should be legal just because you bought one copy and are therefore allowed to "do whatever you want with it". That has never been the case for copyrighted works, and copyright is an old, old law. If your example had been publishers trying to stop people from reselling the paper rolls, that would have been analogous.
It's a matter of crude oil costs vs. refining costs. Gasoline is more highly refined, and uses crude oil more efficiently to produce a given quantity.
In countries which produce and export large quantities of oil, especially if they don't have large refineries themselves, diesel is much cheaper than gasoline.
Don't put too much weight on that "BSD-based" statement. A small portion of the OS X (Darwin, specifically) userspace is BSD-based, and it's well hidden and a bit corrupted even then. The filesystem layout is technically POSIX-compliant, but it looks like no *nix I've ever seen. It is not, be default, case-sensitive either. The config files that you expect to find are present, but they don't always do what they should - in fact, some appear to be ignored outright - and the man pages can be a total lie (I had great "fun" figuring out user-controlled drive mounting on an OS X system that didn't want to mount a particular volume, and discovering that no item out of the `mount` command, the file/etc/fstab, and the man pages for either one also agreed with any of the others). GUI-installed programs don't seem to get put in PATH by default, so have fun launching them from the command line (have I mentioned that the filesystem layout is fucking arcane?). Open-source software will usually compile and run, but there's no guarantees and you may need to use the remarkably awful X11 server for OS X to run graphical ones (which has had issues with things like copy/paste buffers, tearing and redraw, resizing windows when running rootless, OpenGL Just not Working even when it worked in the previous version, and so on).
In my experience, Interix (the userspace component of the Subsystem for Unix Applications on Windows) is a better option if you want a BSD-like OS in your well-supported graphical desktop. It uses BSD-family executables where possible, and although there are relatively few (a couple hundred) pre-compiled software packages for it, they are at least easily available (the various Darwin software repos seem to all adore compiling from source); you can of course compile more from source yourself. Interix does not claim to be Unix, merely an environment in which to run Unix programs, but at least what it says it can do usually works. I have had no such luck trying to use Darwin.
By market share, iOS is more successful than every version of OS X combined. Maybe they *are* trying to improve one OS until it's as good as the other...
Mind you, I can't stand to use either...and re-purposing Mac hardware after Apple abandons it can be a serious pain in the ass (I just had to fix up a 2006-era Core Duo MBP to run Win7, and it was a multi-hour process of which maybe 30 minutes involved actually installing Win7 and its drivers).
I noticed that lack too. These days, Arab countries and Muslim culture are seen as anti-science, but for a large part of Christianity's existence, they often had better medicine, mathematics (we use Arabic numerals - as opposed to the Christian nation's of Rome's numeral system - for a reason), and so on. Despite lacking any proper scientific method, they made many discoveries and tested many hypotheses, recording the results and building on past observations.
The concept of the scientific method, as a defined process, is only a few hundred years old. The history of people practicing the scientific method - observing interactions in the world, hypothesizing on the cause of those effects, creating a testable theory that predicts a specific result, executing the test, and adjusting the theory to match the results (*not* the other way around) with, as needed, additional tests - that's been going on since before Christianity existed (the ancient Greeks and Chinese, for example).
Yes, something is only science if it follows the scientific method. Insert "scientific" before words like "theory" and "hypothesis" if you prefer. If it is not based on observation, it is dreaming and imagination (even if some of those dreams end up being approximately accurate, it's not scientific thought). If it is based on observation but is accepted without a testable theory, it is a myth and not a hypothesis ("gods move the sun"). If it is based on an explanation of an effect from a cause, but makes no disprovable predictions, it's speculation and not a theory (testability requires disprovability; intelligent design is a good example). If it is a testable hypothesis but the hypothesis is accepted without ever being tested, it's not scientific (as a class, it's probably best called propaganda, and the cause is probably political; see the "black people have smaller brains than white people, that's why they are less advanced" theories cooked up in the early days of the USA). If it is a tested theory but the test failed to produce the predicted result and yet the theory is not discredited or modified, it's dogma (these days, Genesis as the origin of species). If it is an accepted theory (or "law") that is contradicted by an observation (and "the math doesn't work out" is an observation) but the theory is not adjusted, or a new prediction made and tested, or the results of that test used to support or refine the theory, then it's probably again best called dogma (clinging to Netwtonian physics and refusing to accept relativity, or any other case of iterative scientific progress refining old theories).
There have existed scientists who did not necessarily follow the scientific process rigorously, for example by performing experiments "to see what happens" rather than to test a prediction, but who have subsequently analyzed the result in detail, repeated the experiment with variations, etc. and identified unexpected results. If no theoretical explanation arises from this and is supported (or refuted and refined) by test results, it is not in and of itself science - but it adds to the body of scientific observation and is therefore part of the process. Those observations and experiments may later be used in creating, revising, supporting, or disproving theories. In addition, there's almost always *some* explanation given, and even if it is not testable at the time; if a testable prediction is made and there's no artificial impediment to testing it, it's still following the scientific method even if only by accident.
Some people feel that the pat-down is more intrusive. Some people don't have body modesty (honestly, it's stupid) and therefore don't care. Hell, some people are just in a hurry.
Some people also need to fly, either for work, or to see family, or just because they want to see more of the world than can be reached by car or boat any time this week.
Sometimes, these people are the same person. My only concern with the nudie-scans is the possible radiation level.
Mostly true. However, the Prius (and many other parallel hybrids) use a continuously variable transmission on the gasoline engine. This allows the RPM to remain quite constant - not perfectly so, but very close. I have a CVT in my (non-hybrid) car, and the RPM basically rises to about 1800 and then just stays there until I stop (or need to pass somebody) whether I'm driving around the neighborhood, on the freeway, or up a mountain road (yes, it's a Subaru).
Only on music (and only on recently-purchased music; it's not retroactive). Not on ebooks or on iTunes video. Not sure when you'd have noticed that though, it's only been pointed out on every DRM-related story (and 80% of the Apple-related ones) on Slashdot in the last few years, and Slashdot *never* discusses DRM or Apple...
There are a handful of neat new features, but one of the big ones that impressed me is that Word (and possibly others?) can now import PDFs, as well as export them. The conversion isn't guaranteed to be perfect, but it does pretty well even on very complex documents (though the process may take some time), and on simple ones I can't tell the difference.
Who, previously, had taken it from MS. Guys, *stop* chasing that award. It's not actually a good thing! I think MS was pretty happy to give it up (after all the security work that went into NT6.x, the IE sandbox, etc.), and Adobe is showing signs of acting that way too (the Reader sandbox was a huge improvement, though Flash is still iffy), but Oracle seems dead-set on holding onto it.
Wrong. Laws are often selective. To take your car analogy and use it correctly, all drivers have to stop at a red light except for emergency vehicles on dispatch, because many laws do actually have common-sense exemptions to the parties they apply to.
In the case of "why can Google provide those links but TPB can't", you're arguing a false statement. Google provides those links by accident, and takes them down regularly; it's merely due to the automated nature of their scanning that a handful of them wind up in the index anyhow. TPB expressly solicits those links and does everything they can to avoid taking them down. The first part of that (intent) is definitely relevant in law. The second part (compliance with DMCA takedown requests) is why Google is on the correct side of the law, and TPB is not.
Sadly, this is about what I expect of WA Republicans. I had somebody tell me recently that he couldn't move to WA permanently because he was a libertarian conservative. I asked him to please do so; I don't agree with many of his political views, but he's still smarter than the average republican voter over here.
In WA, the republicans support gay marriage (or at least civil unions, which we had until the last election when full marriage was approved by the voters) and are at least moderately concerned about the environment and greenhouse gases. They have to be; the electorate out here will stand for nothing less. On the other hand, most of them find plenty of other ways to be idiotic, such as their economic/tax policies and views on business regulation.
I've voted for R a time or two, when their opponent seemed either too much in the pocket of some business interest, hopelessly inexperienced, or really, really far off in left field... but I never voted for this moron, and I don't intend to.
Depending on what you mean by "natively", I have all of those on Windows ("depending" because they're native on the NT kernel, but not on the Win32 subsystem). The first four and the last are certainly native on Windows. There are full git suites for Win32 as well, although differences in the permissions model and such might be stretched enough to disqualify them from being "native". Ssh client is of course available. Ssh server is the most questionable, I suppose; there are of course ssh servers for Win32, even discounting Cygwin and its ilk; the network protocol is hardly beyond the capability of the Windows API. The bigger question is what you run after connecting; the lack of a Unix shell on most Windows systems could again be used to consider sshd on Win32 as "not native".
But, what about openssh (including sshd) on NT? That *is* available, although it goes through the POSIX subsystem rather than the Win32 subsystem (both are available although the POSIX one only on high-end editions; the OS/2 subsystem was dropped around a decade ago). My Win7 box is running about 7 POSIX processes right now, including init, cron, a localhost-only inetd, and sshd. If I ssh into the system with my Windows user account credentials and otherwise normal options, it will run bash for me. If I invoke bash (or another POSIX shell; I have several installed) and then run sudo, it will actually work as expected (setuid root) - something Cygwin is incapable of (the "sudo-for-cygwin" project is a complete hack that only vaguely achieves the same thing). I have git (and subversion and a couple even older ones), ruby (in case you don't like the win32 version), vim (gvim works but uses an X11 server rather than using Windows GUI code directly), gcc, gdb, GNU make (plus a few others), and all the various required headers and object archives, plus manpages. The filesystem behavior is case sensitive (this occasionally confuses Win32 programs, but generally they cope; NTFS has always been case-preserving and will preferentially match on exact case even in Win32). Shared object libraries work, and can be compiled. Although the binary images are PE-format (there's an ELF loader available, but it's very, very third-party-hack), they don't need extensions like.exe or anything; in Task Manager, the Image Name column for my sshd process is simply "sshd", not "sshd.exe" like it would be on Cygwin.
I like Windows because it lets me natively run all the programs you listed (though I don't use the Adobe stuff), plus a bunch of stuff that won't natively run on OS X or Linux (or any other OS).
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There's a pretty trivial hack to disable TMoUS's ability to detect tethering, so unless they've changed how they do that the nominal limit on tethering is irrelevant. Basically, use a "custom" APN that just happens to be the normal phone-data APN. The default configuration uses a different APN for tethered data, which they use to track your usage. By setting the custom APN, all data is routed through there and treated as phone data.
The $30/mo for 1500min plan is still available, it's just been relegated to relatively small print near the bottom of the page. http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans still lists it (and the $30 for unlimited texts and data, 100min talk) though, as well as the new plans. You just have to scroll down a bit.
They actually still do, those plans just aren't marketed hard anymore. See the last two plans listed on this page, specifically the one on the left: http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans
Yeah, I don't know why they aren't marketing plans those better; to most people I think they're much better options. I'm sure there are people who still need unlimited minutes, but personally I almost never use even the 300 minutes that it would take to make that plan have the same cost as the baseline new plan ($30/mo w/ 100min + 200 addl. min/mo at $0.10/min = $50/mo for 300mi/mo) and I definitely use a hell of a lot more data than that (it helps that I'm on an effectively unlimited plan, but even counting tethering I almost never break 2GB; I'm currently at around 1GB).
Sounds more like you just have a really shitty phone... I've had visual voicemail (which is a 0.00 line item on my bill) for about two years with T-Mobile. Yes, what I had *before* the VVM was complete crap, and a phone update was required to use VVM... but it works fine now! It's getting about time for me to upgrade, too.
The desktop is *right there* where it always was (ok, you have to click 1 button to show it when the PC starts up now, whoop-de-fucking-do). Why are people even trying to use Metro on work machines? It's awful for productivity. Fortunately, Win8 has not taken away the desktop, and it offers quite a few improvements that have nothing to do with Metro at all - in fact, it offers some desktop-specific improvements too!
That's an awful lot of hackery and wasted effort for something the OS does for you...
Either set shortcut hotkeys (right-click the shortcut, select Properties, select Shortcut Key, press the keybinding chord you want to use - for example, Ctrl+Shift+F for Firefox) or just pin the apps you want and press Win+[#] (as in, Win+4 to launch the fourth pinned app, note that this must be done as a chord not a sequence like you do now), or just use Start search (which still works on Win8, mostly) and hit Win+[first few letters of prog name]+Enter.
I have a Win8 tablet and a desktop running it (as well as FreeBSD, OpenSuse Linux, Backtrack Linux, and a handful of others in VMs). On both of them, I spend nearly all my time in the desktop. What about the Win8 desktop feels non-"normal" to you? The fact that the Start button is hidden until you mouse over it? Boo hoo, I'm sorry but that is a ridiculous complaint. Aside from that difference, and the removal of transparent window borders (which is lame but hardly a huge blow to the OS), the desktop works just like it did on Win7, with the addition of the nifty Win+X menu (also reachable by right-clicking the Start button) and the pretty much irrelevant not corners. Well, and the vastly improved multi-desktop support, but I doubt that's what you were griping about.
Now, the Start screen itself... that could use some improvement. I don't give a damn about it being a screen instead of a menu; I haven't used a Start menu since XP and the fact that in XP you have virtually no choice on the matter is one of the things I detest about that OS. Start search is better than the menu in almost every possible way; it's faster, it lets you search by program title or executable name, you don't have to know the path to something, you don't ever have to scroll, you can find by partial match on a name, and it doesn't require any additional clicks to use.
Or, at least, it didn't. Win8's Start search still works, but "Apps" and "Settings" and "Files" are now segregated, showing only one at a time and requiring a couple clicks (or a mouse action, which is stupid for a text-driven tool like search) to switch between them. That is my biggest complaint about Win8. My second-biggest is the fact that you can no longer have Windows Media Center and the Subsystem for Unix Applications in the same OS edition... yeah, I use esoteric features.
Metro I find to be mostly useless, so I don't use it (except for the few hundred miliseconds it takes to type Win + [some letters of program name] + Enter).
Yep, that's a good example of 2FA. Calling "username and password" two factors is foolish; your username isn't even an authentication credential at all in most cases (that is, it's typically at least semi-public information). It's an identifier, not a credential.
However, even if the username is treated as a second password, then you don't really have two passwords; you have one long password with a break in the middle. There's no meaningful difference between them at that point.
This makes me sad. Very, very sad. It's a sorry state we've fallen to in just a few years.
Blizzard Entertainment released StarCraft in 1998, almost exactly 15 years ago, and its expansion Brood War later that year. Although they occasionally re-packaged the game for digital downloads or "Battle Chest" bundles, they never introduced any new paid content. However, for months (years) they released freely downloadable maps. They continued patching the game for almost 11 years, releasing the final patch in 2009. While early patches were largely balance tweaks and bug fixes, they also updated the game to work on new operating systems and released a legitimate no-CD patch and online installer. The download site for patches is still live, including for older patch versions. The online multiplayer servers (Battle.Net) are still up, and are still free to use (there is, or used to be, some generally unobtrusive advertising).
I used to love that company. I still play their old games, in fact the last copy of SC that I bought was less than five years ago. However... I can't stand what they're doing with always-online gaming in every game newer than WarCraft 3. WOW had an excuse, but SC2 and D3 don't. I regret this, because it means I won't buy those games even though I quite enjoyed the SC2 beta. But in the meantime, their older games still work just fine... and when I get a new PC, I can install the games, the bonus maps, and the patches without worrying about whether I'll need to grab them from some shady site or whether they'll work on my PC*
* SC was never recompiled for x86 Macs, although it was updated to run on OS X. If you have a new version of OS X that doesn't include support for Rosetta (the PPC emulator layer), you can run the game in Windows or Wine just fine; a purchased copy was good for both operating systems.
To be fair, Flash on the N800 *was* a battery hog that substantially impacted performance. On the other hand, the N800 could use FlashBlock and/or AdBlock Plus, so you could get all the benefits of Flash (I used to use it to stream from Pandora, for example) without the downsides (slow ad networks impacting browsing performance, annoying animations leaping out at you, pages slowing down while the CPU struggles with Flash, etc.)
At the time that I was messing with the N800 (Maemo OS2008 had just come out, I think), the fact that the iPhone could play YouTube vides was a big freaking deal... but the N800 could play not just YouTube, but any other Flash videos online and didn't need to switch apps to do it, either. It could also play (many) Flash games, navigate Flash-based websites, and so on. For a device that was also largely sold on the quality of its mobile browsing experience, the iPhone browser was lame compared to the OS2008 browser (Gecko-based - previous versions had been Opera-based - and extensible).
Of course, despite its screen being smaller and lower-resolution, the iPhone did have one notable advantage over the N800: capacitive touchscreen vs. resistive touchscreen. Resistive has some perks, like the ability to be really precise with a stylus (though the handwriting recognition was "meh" at best), but it had no multitouch capability and required the application of non-trivial pressure, which over time could damage the screen surface a bit.
Um... copyright does prohibit making (unlicensed) copies of software, just as it prohibits making unlicensed copies of books, paintings, musical recordings, and so on. That applies as much to a modern copy of Windows as to an archaic player piano paper roll. It also applies to textbooks. It is (legally) distinct from first sale.
The difference is that the person in question here actually paid for each copy that was purchased, then re-sold those copies. The right to do that is what was upheld. Duplicating a copyrighted work without a license to do so - such as using a hole-punch to duplicate the information encoded in strips of hole-punched paper - is still illegal, and has been since well over 100 years ago.
Just to be clear, I don't in any way disagree with the sentiment you were expressing (that software should be treated the same as other copyrighted works). I'm mostly objecting to your choice of example, implying that creating unlicensed copies of a purchased (but copyrighted) work should be legal just because you bought one copy and are therefore allowed to "do whatever you want with it". That has never been the case for copyrighted works, and copyright is an old, old law. If your example had been publishers trying to stop people from reselling the paper rolls, that would have been analogous.
It's a matter of crude oil costs vs. refining costs. Gasoline is more highly refined, and uses crude oil more efficiently to produce a given quantity.
In countries which produce and export large quantities of oil, especially if they don't have large refineries themselves, diesel is much cheaper than gasoline.
Don't put too much weight on that "BSD-based" statement. A small portion of the OS X (Darwin, specifically) userspace is BSD-based, and it's well hidden and a bit corrupted even then. The filesystem layout is technically POSIX-compliant, but it looks like no *nix I've ever seen. It is not, be default, case-sensitive either. The config files that you expect to find are present, but they don't always do what they should - in fact, some appear to be ignored outright - and the man pages can be a total lie (I had great "fun" figuring out user-controlled drive mounting on an OS X system that didn't want to mount a particular volume, and discovering that no item out of the `mount` command, the file /etc/fstab, and the man pages for either one also agreed with any of the others). GUI-installed programs don't seem to get put in PATH by default, so have fun launching them from the command line (have I mentioned that the filesystem layout is fucking arcane?). Open-source software will usually compile and run, but there's no guarantees and you may need to use the remarkably awful X11 server for OS X to run graphical ones (which has had issues with things like copy/paste buffers, tearing and redraw, resizing windows when running rootless, OpenGL Just not Working even when it worked in the previous version, and so on).
In my experience, Interix (the userspace component of the Subsystem for Unix Applications on Windows) is a better option if you want a BSD-like OS in your well-supported graphical desktop. It uses BSD-family executables where possible, and although there are relatively few (a couple hundred) pre-compiled software packages for it, they are at least easily available (the various Darwin software repos seem to all adore compiling from source); you can of course compile more from source yourself. Interix does not claim to be Unix, merely an environment in which to run Unix programs, but at least what it says it can do usually works. I have had no such luck trying to use Darwin.
By market share, iOS is more successful than every version of OS X combined. Maybe they *are* trying to improve one OS until it's as good as the other...
Mind you, I can't stand to use either...and re-purposing Mac hardware after Apple abandons it can be a serious pain in the ass (I just had to fix up a 2006-era Core Duo MBP to run Win7, and it was a multi-hour process of which maybe 30 minutes involved actually installing Win7 and its drivers).
I noticed that lack too. These days, Arab countries and Muslim culture are seen as anti-science, but for a large part of Christianity's existence, they often had better medicine, mathematics (we use Arabic numerals - as opposed to the Christian nation's of Rome's numeral system - for a reason), and so on. Despite lacking any proper scientific method, they made many discoveries and tested many hypotheses, recording the results and building on past observations.
The concept of the scientific method, as a defined process, is only a few hundred years old.
The history of people practicing the scientific method - observing interactions in the world, hypothesizing on the cause of those effects, creating a testable theory that predicts a specific result, executing the test, and adjusting the theory to match the results (*not* the other way around) with, as needed, additional tests - that's been going on since before Christianity existed (the ancient Greeks and Chinese, for example).
Yes, something is only science if it follows the scientific method. Insert "scientific" before words like "theory" and "hypothesis" if you prefer.
If it is not based on observation, it is dreaming and imagination (even if some of those dreams end up being approximately accurate, it's not scientific thought).
If it is based on observation but is accepted without a testable theory, it is a myth and not a hypothesis ("gods move the sun").
If it is based on an explanation of an effect from a cause, but makes no disprovable predictions, it's speculation and not a theory (testability requires disprovability; intelligent design is a good example).
If it is a testable hypothesis but the hypothesis is accepted without ever being tested, it's not scientific (as a class, it's probably best called propaganda, and the cause is probably political; see the "black people have smaller brains than white people, that's why they are less advanced" theories cooked up in the early days of the USA).
If it is a tested theory but the test failed to produce the predicted result and yet the theory is not discredited or modified, it's dogma (these days, Genesis as the origin of species).
If it is an accepted theory (or "law") that is contradicted by an observation (and "the math doesn't work out" is an observation) but the theory is not adjusted, or a new prediction made and tested, or the results of that test used to support or refine the theory, then it's probably again best called dogma (clinging to Netwtonian physics and refusing to accept relativity, or any other case of iterative scientific progress refining old theories).
There have existed scientists who did not necessarily follow the scientific process rigorously, for example by performing experiments "to see what happens" rather than to test a prediction, but who have subsequently analyzed the result in detail, repeated the experiment with variations, etc. and identified unexpected results. If no theoretical explanation arises from this and is supported (or refuted and refined) by test results, it is not in and of itself science - but it adds to the body of scientific observation and is therefore part of the process. Those observations and experiments may later be used in creating, revising, supporting, or disproving theories. In addition, there's almost always *some* explanation given, and even if it is not testable at the time; if a testable prediction is made and there's no artificial impediment to testing it, it's still following the scientific method even if only by accident.
Some people feel that the pat-down is more intrusive. Some people don't have body modesty (honestly, it's stupid) and therefore don't care. Hell, some people are just in a hurry.
Some people also need to fly, either for work, or to see family, or just because they want to see more of the world than can be reached by car or boat any time this week.
Sometimes, these people are the same person. My only concern with the nudie-scans is the possible radiation level.
Mostly true. However, the Prius (and many other parallel hybrids) use a continuously variable transmission on the gasoline engine. This allows the RPM to remain quite constant - not perfectly so, but very close. I have a CVT in my (non-hybrid) car, and the RPM basically rises to about 1800 and then just stays there until I stop (or need to pass somebody) whether I'm driving around the neighborhood, on the freeway, or up a mountain road (yes, it's a Subaru).
Only on music (and only on recently-purchased music; it's not retroactive). Not on ebooks or on iTunes video. Not sure when you'd have noticed that though, it's only been pointed out on every DRM-related story (and 80% of the Apple-related ones) on Slashdot in the last few years, and Slashdot *never* discusses DRM or Apple...
OS X was listed in TFA, but not in the headline of it. That headline was pretty directly re-used for Slashdot.
What, bias in the tech community?? No way...
There are a handful of neat new features, but one of the big ones that impressed me is that Word (and possibly others?) can now import PDFs, as well as export them. The conversion isn't guaranteed to be perfect, but it does pretty well even on very complex documents (though the process may take some time), and on simple ones I can't tell the difference.
The trick also works with Bing. I'm not sure why other search engines would let them get away with it.
Who, previously, had taken it from MS. Guys, *stop* chasing that award. It's not actually a good thing! I think MS was pretty happy to give it up (after all the security work that went into NT6.x, the IE sandbox, etc.), and Adobe is showing signs of acting that way too (the Reader sandbox was a huge improvement, though Flash is still iffy), but Oracle seems dead-set on holding onto it.
Wrong. Laws are often selective. To take your car analogy and use it correctly, all drivers have to stop at a red light except for emergency vehicles on dispatch, because many laws do actually have common-sense exemptions to the parties they apply to.
In the case of "why can Google provide those links but TPB can't", you're arguing a false statement. Google provides those links by accident, and takes them down regularly; it's merely due to the automated nature of their scanning that a handful of them wind up in the index anyhow. TPB expressly solicits those links and does everything they can to avoid taking them down. The first part of that (intent) is definitely relevant in law. The second part (compliance with DMCA takedown requests) is why Google is on the correct side of the law, and TPB is not.
Sadly, this is about what I expect of WA Republicans. I had somebody tell me recently that he couldn't move to WA permanently because he was a libertarian conservative. I asked him to please do so; I don't agree with many of his political views, but he's still smarter than the average republican voter over here.
In WA, the republicans support gay marriage (or at least civil unions, which we had until the last election when full marriage was approved by the voters) and are at least moderately concerned about the environment and greenhouse gases. They have to be; the electorate out here will stand for nothing less. On the other hand, most of them find plenty of other ways to be idiotic, such as their economic/tax policies and views on business regulation.
I've voted for R a time or two, when their opponent seemed either too much in the pocket of some business interest, hopelessly inexperienced, or really, really far off in left field... but I never voted for this moron, and I don't intend to.
Depending on what you mean by "natively", I have all of those on Windows ("depending" because they're native on the NT kernel, but not on the Win32 subsystem). The first four and the last are certainly native on Windows. There are full git suites for Win32 as well, although differences in the permissions model and such might be stretched enough to disqualify them from being "native". Ssh client is of course available. Ssh server is the most questionable, I suppose; there are of course ssh servers for Win32, even discounting Cygwin and its ilk; the network protocol is hardly beyond the capability of the Windows API. The bigger question is what you run after connecting; the lack of a Unix shell on most Windows systems could again be used to consider sshd on Win32 as "not native".
But, what about openssh (including sshd) on NT? That *is* available, although it goes through the POSIX subsystem rather than the Win32 subsystem (both are available although the POSIX one only on high-end editions; the OS/2 subsystem was dropped around a decade ago). My Win7 box is running about 7 POSIX processes right now, including init, cron, a localhost-only inetd, and sshd. If I ssh into the system with my Windows user account credentials and otherwise normal options, it will run bash for me. If I invoke bash (or another POSIX shell; I have several installed) and then run sudo, it will actually work as expected (setuid root) - something Cygwin is incapable of (the "sudo-for-cygwin" project is a complete hack that only vaguely achieves the same thing). I have git (and subversion and a couple even older ones), ruby (in case you don't like the win32 version), vim (gvim works but uses an X11 server rather than using Windows GUI code directly), gcc, gdb, GNU make (plus a few others), and all the various required headers and object archives, plus manpages. The filesystem behavior is case sensitive (this occasionally confuses Win32 programs, but generally they cope; NTFS has always been case-preserving and will preferentially match on exact case even in Win32). Shared object libraries work, and can be compiled. Although the binary images are PE-format (there's an ELF loader available, but it's very, very third-party-hack), they don't need extensions like .exe or anything; in Task Manager, the Image Name column for my sshd process is simply "sshd", not "sshd.exe" like it would be on Cygwin.
I like Windows because it lets me natively run all the programs you listed (though I don't use the Adobe stuff), plus a bunch of stuff that won't natively run on OS X or Linux (or any other OS).